1. Field
Various embodiments described herein in detail relate to a data collection apparatus and method thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
IT systems that provide clients with a variety of information technology (IT) services have become widely used. For example, use of a web server, an application server, a data base server, storage or the like in combination allows the IT systems to provide a variety of IT services coupled with recent widespread use of high-speed communication technologies and high-speed communication lines. In the above-discussed IT systems, data collection apparatuses that collect application information from respective servers have also been used for the purpose of detecting failures at earlier stages, managing applications running on the respective servers, or performing other processing.
Hereinafter, such an IT system that includes the data collection apparatus will be discussed in detail. More specifically, as illustrated in FIG. 24, the IT system includes a monitoring target server group, a data collection apparatus, and a data management apparatus. The monitoring target server group is made up of servers each of which provides the clients with the IT services. As the monitoring target server group, there may be mentioned, for example, the web server, the application server, the database server, the storage or the like.
The data collection apparatus collects the application information, for example, processes making up applications, deployed applications running on the applications or the like, from each of the monitoring target servers. Next, the data collection apparatus sends the collected instance information, to the data management apparatus. The data management apparatus is a server apparatus that includes a configuration management database. The data management apparatus may store instance information received from the data collection apparatus in an integrated fashion and manage each piece of the application information by associating the respective pieces of the application information with each other.
In the above-discussed IT system, the data collection apparatus collects the application information periodically, for example, in an interval of one (1) minute, from the monitoring target servers, and the collected application information is stored in the data management apparatus. Administrators or the like may detect the failures by making analysis of the application information stored in the data management apparatus and manage application information and/or applications having been added and/or deleted.
However, a certain amount of time is consumed by the data collection apparatus for collecting the application information and storing the collected application information in the data management apparatus in cases of large scale IT systems that include a large number of monitoring target servers. Making an interval for application information collection shorter to achieve the application information collection almost real-time results in a delay in data collection processing because it is difficult to complete the data collection processing during which the application information is collected and stored, until the next collection point.
For this reason, a data collection apparatus, for example, as discussed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Hei 02-277114, has been used in recent years. The data collection apparatus discussed above compares application information having been collected in the past with the latest collected application information, and only the application information with a difference is stored in a data management apparatus. This technique may make it possible to reduce data collection/processing time.
However, the conventional technique discussed above results in an increase in load when comparing the application information in the cases of large scale IT systems that include a large number of monitoring target servers. Consequently, a delay is caused in the data collection processing during which the application information is collected and stored.